During the Consumer Electronics Association or the CES 2013 in Las Vegas, Nvidia unveiled their newest project, “Project Shield” or Nvidia Shield. It is basically Nvidia’s plans in creating its own hand held video gaming console.
The announcement on Nvidia shield came on the first major press conference. Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, showed off a working prototype of the Shield, however he did not reveal the release date and the price of the device. This came to a surprise since the company have been focusing on the selling of chips and video cards to other manufacturers.
Project Shield is bigger than a Xbox 360 controller. It has a 5 inch multi-touch screen connected to the frame which holds the joystick and buttons of the device. The video has a 720p resolution. It is compatible with TV’s via an HDMI cable. This device would not be only able to play Android games and applications, the user could also stream from the PC and be able to play PC games on the device itself. Yes, that means playing Assassin’s Creed, Borderlands 2 on a handheld device! In the demonstration some titles from Valve’s Steam PC platform was used to show off this unique feature. It uses wi-fi to connect to the PC, which is using one of Nvidia’s video cards to run the PC games. Currently, to avoid latency issues, the same home network would be used by the user to connect the device with the PC when streaming. This device is powered with the new and powerful Tegra 4 processor, which is said to be the most powerful mobile processor in the market to date. The keys represents the basic Android commands and the “Shield” button. This button to a game store which features titles from the Android Play Market.
The Project Shield is another unique technology that will be coming out in the market soon. Nvidia took a real big step and this is really thinking outside of the box when it comes to them, since they are known in creating PC video cards or basically PC components. Now they are involving themselves with end-users unlike before.
